"Co-Frobenius" coalgebras were introduced as dualizations of
Frobenius algebras.
We previously showed
that they admit
left-right symmetric characterizations analogue to those of Frobenius
algebras. We consider the more general quasi-co-Frobenius (QcF)
coalgebras; the first main result in this paper is that these also
admit symmetric characterizations: a coalgebra is QcF if it is weakly
isomorphic to its (left, or right) rational dual $Rat(C^*)$, in the
sense that certain coproduct or product powers of these objects are
isomorphic. Fundamental results of Hopf algebras, such as the
equivalent characterizations of Hopf algebras with nonzero integrals
as left (or right) co-Frobenius, QcF, semiperfect or with nonzero
rational dual, as well as the uniqueness of integrals and a short
proof of the bijectivity of the antipode for such Hopf algebras all
follow as a consequence of these results. This gives a purely
representation theoretic approach to many of the basic fundamental
results in the theory of Hopf algebras. Furthermore, we introduce a
general concept of Frobenius algebra, which makes sense for infinite
dimensional and for topological algebras, and specializes to the
classical notion in the finite case. This will be a topological
algebra $A$ that is isomorphic to its complete topological dual
$A^\vee$. We show that $A$ is a (quasi)Frobenius algebra if and only
if $A$ is the dual $C^*$ of a (quasi)co-Frobenius coalgebra $C$. We
give many examples of co-Frobenius coalgebras and Hopf algebras
connected to category theory, homological algebra and the newer
q-homological algebra, topology or graph theory, showing the
importance of the concept.